He has attitude and empathy, he knows about stimulus and impetus, application and implication, dramatic presentation, filmic transposition, flexible formulation, and the other aids to radical renewal, he has experience and perspective, indeed for both reality and vision, he has zest for life and world philosophy, he approves of ethos and pathos but also mythos, he supplies subordination and integration into the living space and working space of the nation, he embraces the emotional realm of community and the vitalism of personality, he professes loyalty to kith and kin and international solidarity and favours synthesis, he transmits stimuli and tentatively explores parameters before arriving at the central modality, in order to fathom latent potential and accentuate the problematics of intellectuality, he knows all about fossilised tradition and burgeoning creativity, he values willpower, recognises purposive achievement, such as the artifice inherent in artistry, he acknowledges fluidity, accessibility, and significant form and can distinguish between the expansive and the convulsive, indeed I suspect that he is oriented in the cosmic; at all events he recognises potential for development and defines emotionally the type that, inescapably, in the final analysis must surely eventuate in trend-setting hegemony and knows that when the build-up of will-power precipitates willed conformity and hence collective action and cultural symbiosis, dynamism and rhythm form prominent parameters, and that then the goal is totality, though in the first instance steely romanticism—in short, you can’t fool him about anything…
Alas, such a paragon of talent and energy is no longer to be found in the contemporary Intellectual sphere, whose denizens are able to perform simple mental functions such as determining that golf, milk and earthquakes are racist but unable to rise above stamping a few simple categories into the human face as if they were boots.
Karl Kraus, in The Third Walpurgisnacht (1933), describes in Josef Goebbels a figure of a stature we can only sigh for today.
